If X is better than Y, is stating so necessary?
Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
81–90 of 395 posts
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#82From the article: > Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices. If you can get a business or a project to the point where it's stable and competitive and it's funding you enough to keep going, then there's a whole…
You would think that non-profits could be more competitive than corporations. Imagine a non-profit Facebook clone that shared its advertising profits with the users. How could Facebook compete with that?
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on the problem you see with the word "toot"?
It's an onomatopoeic term for briefly sounding a horn, but I almost never hear it used for that. In my experience, there are two primary uses of the word in American English: 1) In the expression toot [one's] own horn , which means to praise oneself. Often in the form "I don't want to toot my own horn, but [...]". 2) A cutesy word for a fart, used primarily when talking to young children. Notably, an elephant using i…
> Notably, an elephant using its trunk to make noise is said to be trumpeting, not tooting.
So if Mr Trump was on Mastodon would we say he was tooting or trumpeting?
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#84What Mastodon badly needs is a desktop client as good as Twitterrific that can crosspost to both Twitter and a Mastodon instance to lower the barrier to slowly switching. Something like Pidgin/Adium is for IM. That way people can default to Mastodon where possible and fallback to Twitter where necessary.
I use this service: https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/
It posts your posts from one to the other, so I can use them interchangeably. I definitely prefer Mastodon, although I was never a big Twitter user.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#85Let me know when Mastodon can take RSS, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and etc. feeds as inputs. The platform needs to have a way to import content to bootstrap an instance without having a lot of friends.
Isn't that a place for 3rd party services, like IFTTT? Doesn't have to be first party.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#86Could anyone share their thoughts about the attractiveness of a platform that says how many characters long your posts can be? What I see on Twitter is that people are constantly fighting this limitation by writing several tweets in a row (sometimes marking them as parts of a whole message). I would think that’s an annoyance. So what’s the attraction?
I would say the majority of tweets on my timeline (>95%) are single-post messages. Knowing that everything on twitter will be relatively short means I can check it when i only have 2-3 minutes to kill for example.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#87From the article: > Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices. If you can get a business or a project to the point where it's stable and competitive and it's funding you enough to keep going, then there's a whole…
It's worth noting that one of the supporting points here > And Twitter doesn't have any choice in the matter, either. [...] Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can is not, strictly speaking, true. This has been discussed a few times on HN recently. (And this book The Shareholder Value Myth is well worth reading: https://ne…
If investors feel that profit is not being maximized, they can sue or take other actions to punish those they see as not focusing on profit etc.
I mean, the point is that "you aren't prioritizing profit" has legal standing for investors. And "we don't prioritize profit in cases that involve harming the world" does not is not a legal stance for the company unless the harm itself is illegal or the entity is a Benefit Corp or similar.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse. In the 90s, if you moved from your universities' mail server to Lycos, you also lose all the people who you were following, since they still had the previous email address. Mastodon just happens to work in the reverse (you have a list of people you follow, rather than of people who fo…
Yes, though it was hypothetically possible to buy a domain and host your own email. Not a solution for most people in those days, certainly! That’s gotten harder and easier today. It’s never been harder to properly manage a mailserver yourself. On the other hand, registering a vanity domain and hosting with a neutral 3rd party like (my current) Fastmail has never been easier. Someone should make a startup that sugges…
I’m surprised FastMail hasn’t made it.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#89From the article: > Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices. If you can get a business or a project to the point where it's stable and competitive and it's funding you enough to keep going, then there's a whole…
This may be a culture thing more than anything else, and more deeply how certain environments affect culture.
For example, in my career I’ve seen nonprofits, large and small, being very hawkish in competition for government contracts. So much so that I developed a saying - “Nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model.”
I think Wall Street is another business environment that creates these very hawkish business cultures, even in (relatively) smaller businesses (biomed for example).
Just thinking along with you here... not sure where I’m going with it. But I know I’ve worked with nonprofits that were very hawkish and sharked the competition all the time.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#90What I find amusing about all these "solutions" to "online outrage" is that they are invariably made by comfortable centrists, with a smattering of libertarians. I can say this with some authority as both of these terms would have aptly described myself, before I lost my career, my home, and everything else in gender transition, and ended up working three minimum wage jobs instead of coding for 2 years. Let me tell y…
Mastodon has a very large and thriving gender-nonbinary / non-normative population. There's a very large East Asian population (mostly Japan, though with Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and China represented). I've seen Indian, Indonesian, Arabic, and other voices. European representation is strongly weighted to France, though with numerous countries and languages represented.
North-American usage tends to tech-early adopters (male, white,some others), and tends to be light on traditional minorities that I've observed (note; personal observation on social networks tends to be exceedingly self-selective and nonrepresentitive).
Libertarian viewpoints don't seem particularly prevalent, or well-received.